Office Hours Fall 2024:  Mondays 1:30-3:30pm and by appointment

Periods: Eighteenth century British and European literature

Languages: English, French

Research Interests: theory and history of narrative and the novel, the Gothic mode in literature and culture, gender and genre, eighteenth-century British and European literature

Prof. Alliston works mainly at the intersections of the fields of eighteenth-century studies, gender studies, and the history and theory of the novel. An ongoing study explores the relationship between European gender conventions and the origins of the modern novel, arguing that the early novel, far from affirming Enlightenment individualism connects new philosophical skepticism about interiority and sense experience with archaic social anxieties around female fidelity. She is also currently working on a biography of James Fenimore Cooper, co-authored with Pamela J. Schirmeister of Yale University.

Support for her research has included fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as, most recently, an Old Dominion Professorship in the Princeton University Council of the Humanities.

Books

Virtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women's Fiction

The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Vol. D, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries)

 The Recess; Or, A Tale of Other Times, a critical edition of Sophia Lee's 1785 novel